Coronation Street has been a constant in my life for the best part of half a century. My memories begin in black and white – of my parents' sitting room in Tyne Tees land with the square box nestled by the net curtains and its announcement: "From the north, Granada presents."

Sitting under his grandmother's kitchen table, hidden by its cloth, Swinton-born Warren learned it was women, rather than men, who ruled the roost. And standing in my pyjamas, gazing through a gap in the hallway door after bedtime, I was to learn the same lesson from the early years of Warren's "north country-based twice-weekly serial" which brought emerging kitchen-sink drama into homes across the country.

"Voices telling stories, that's all any of us can hope to be," says Warren, played by David Dawson in BBC4's film. The arrival of Coronation Street in December 1960 gave the north and its working class their first TV voice, far removed from Biggles, Bonanza and the clipped tones of Torchy the Battery Boy. These people had a regional accent, just as we did, which had previously been restricted to comedy turns like BBC Radio's The Clitheroe Kid. It might not have been a Geordie accent, but it was a lot more familiar than those of the nightly TV newscasters or on American imports. They even had their tea at night and dinner in the middle of the day, unlike those confused posh lot down in London. It came complete with Eric Spear's theme music; a cornet clarion call to prayer. Coronation Street was as northern as the lard in our local Co-op.

Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman later remarked that, in Coronation Street, Manchester had produced a modern day version of The Pickwick Papers. Charles Dickens would surely have been right at home alongside a cast of characters called Ena Sharples, Albert Tatlock, Florrie Lindley, Elsie Tanner and Minnie Caldwell, nursing a glass of stout in the Rovers Return or walking the Coronation Street cobbles. Not that they were always going to be Coronation Street cobbles: both Florizel and Jubilee were considered as road names before being rejected. It might be filmed in Quay Street, Manchester, but the show is set across the Irwell in Salford, around the corner from other backstreet terraces named Rosamund, Crimea and Victoria.

One side of Corrie's cobbles still retains those terraces, many of which in off-screen Salford were swept away in the high-rise hysteria of the 1960s. While Coronation Street has evolved and changed, it has never lost its strong sense of place, community and supply of barmcakes. Of course the show has had its ups and downs – and faced competition from upstarts such as EastEnders. But I've never strayed. Even in the bad times, you know something is lurking in the ginnel ready to restore your faith.

Tonight's BBC4 drama is a beautifully crafted love letter to the past by former Street archivist and writer Daran Little, which ends just as Britain's first TV soap opera begins: if you too have black and white memories, prepare to shed a tear, like I did. Because while I eventually moved down to that London and my mum and dad went to the great Red Rec in the sky, every time I hear that theme music, I'm returned to a northern hallway; a child trying not to make a noise. Watching Coronation Street reflected in my parents' eyes.